The Real Fall of Rome

On September 4, 476 AD, a sixteen-year-old emperor named Romulus Augustulus was pensioned off by a Germanic chieftain named Odoacer. There was no battle. There was no siege. Odoacer just walked into the palace, gave the teenage emperor a country estate, and wrote a polite letter to the Eastern Roman Emperor saying the West didn't need its own emperor anymore. The bureaucracy in Italy kept…